Contents

Several attempts have been made to develop a creativity quotient of an individual similar to the Intelligence quotient (IQ), however these have been unsuccessful.[1] Most measures of creativity are dependent on the personal judgement of the tester, so a standardized measure is difficult, if not impossible, to develop.

Plot Titles, where participants are given the plot of a story and asked to write original titles.

Quick Responses is a word-association test scored for uncommonness.

Figure Concepts, where participants were given simple drawings of objects and individuals and asked to find qualities or features that are common by two or more drawings; these were scored for uncommonness.

Unusual Uses is finding unusual uses for common everyday objects such as bricks.

Remote Associations, where participants are asked to find a word between two given words (e.g. Hand _____ Call)

Remote Consequences, where participants are asked to generate a list of consequences of unexpected events (e.g. loss of gravity)

Building on Guilford's work, Torrance[3] developed the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking in 1974. They involved simple tests of divergent thinking and other problem-solving skills, which were scored on:

Fluency. The total number of interpretable, meaningful, and relevant ideas generated in response to the stimulus.

Flexibility. The number of different categories of relevant responses.

Originality. The statistical rarity of the responses among the test subjects.

Elaboration. The amount of detail in the responses.

The Creativity Achievement Questionnaire, a self-report test that measures creative achievement across 10 domains, was described in 2005 and shown to be reliable and valid when compared to other measures of creativity and to independent evaluation of creative output.[4]

Some researchers have taken a social-personality approach to the measurement of creativity. In these studies, personality traits such as independence of judgement, self-confidence, attraction to complexity, aesthetic orientation and risk-taking are used as measures of the creativity of individuals.[5] Other researchers[6] have related creativity to the trait, openness to experience.

The creativity of thousands of Japanese, expressed in terms of their problem-solving and problem-recognizing capabilities, has been measured in Japanese firms.[7]

Howard Gruber insisted on a case-study approach that expresses the existential and unique quality of the creator. Creativity to Gruber was the product of purposeful work and this work could be described only as a confluence of forces in the specifics of the case.

Tudor Rickards identified four barriers to personal creativity from studies of European executives[8]

↑Rickards, T. & Jones, L.J., (1991) 'Towards the identification and characterizing of situational barriers to creative behaviors: The development of a self-report inventory', Creativity Research Journal, Vol. 4 No 4, pp304-315